The Moon Is Alive (For Now)

Earth’s Moon appears seismically quiet: its major
volcanic and tectonic activity is confined to its distant past, as
evidenced by the lack of new large-scale features on the surface.
However, recent images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO)
have revealed smaller features that had escaped earlier notice.
Several regions exhibit small ravines known as graben that
are free of cratering or other marring, which indicates relatively
recent formation.

A new paper in Nature Geoscience (by Thomas R. Watters,
Mark S. Robinson, Maria E. Banks, Thanh Tran, and Brett W. Denevi)
suggests these shallow graben may have formed within the last 50
million years. While this activity is not precisely new, it
postdates the last major tectonic activity, which ended roughly 1.2
billion years ago. Since graben form under extension—the
stretching of rock by internal pressures—the authors argue that the
Moon’s interior may still have a significant molten component, and
that its cooling and contraction is producing new features on small
scales.

Oh, ho ho ho, the moon is still
alive, is it? GOOD. Now we know it will really feel it when we mine
the fuck out of it! I mean, I was perfectly happy to blow that
stupid piece of shit up even when I thought it was dead—which, for
all intents and purposes it is, because it’s COMPLETELY USELESS—but
the very idea that it will gasp and cry out as we pierce its crusty
shell with our sharp and pointy implements of destruction makes the
whole thing even more delicious. Take it all, moon!